Featured Articles: 2010

Receiving a gift of food, shelter, a Mercedes Benz -- there can be as much rejection of the world as when one is stingy with their change. Graciously receiving a gift is as much an act of opening as giving one is.

Yes, it is. And in honor of National Unfriend Day I'm going to tell you exactly how the internet is lying to you. It is lying because it is promising you endless satisfaction of all your desires - if you feel it, want it, wonder it, want to...

In his essay, Instructions for the Cook, Zen Master Dogen encourages us to use all the ingredients of our life. Koshin Paley Elliso explores Zen Master Dogen's discussion with a cook eight hundred years ago in China and how it is both...

Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...

I had the awesome opportunity to moderate the panel discussion at the kickoff of the Rebel Buddha tour with book author Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Roshi Enkyo O’Hara, and Mitra Mark Power. The topic: “What is American Buddhism?...

According to a new study, it turns out that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. That's a pretty amazingly simple discovery, but the study demonstrates that our happiness level is less based on what we are doing than how simply we are engaged...

Tho' the IDP leads a robust existence in the digital realm (thousands worldwide listen to our podcasts, read the blog, and participate in home-study courses) we are physical as well, with more than 200 local members who donate monthly and...

Today is Veterans Day. I come from a long line of veterans. My brother served recently in Iraq for the Marines, while we grew up in an Air Force family where moving every 3-4 years was commonplace (hello Oklahoma! hello California! hello South...

Roshi Enkyo O'Hara (IDP lineage mentor and Soto Zen teacher extraordinaire) is going to be teaching on and offering the Bodhisattva Vow this weekend at IDP. The Bodhisattva Vow is basically what crazy people do. We vow to completely...

As I practiced mindfulness of my body recently in preparation for my morning practice, I experienced a profound wave of gratitude for sensation - what felt good, what felt "not good", the ability to stand there at all and feel my body...

Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...

How often do you really listen without filtering?
Unmitigated, unprocessed listening — no labeling, no judgments, no interpreting — is something very rare.
Most of the time you're probably judging, criticizing and filtering...

I've been thinking about aging a lot recently. I don't mean growing elderly (though of course that is a period of aging unlike any other). From the perspective of Buddhist teachings, aging is any period of life change, any period where you...

While there is poverty in New York, there is quite a bit of privilege here too. Often privilege does not acknowledge itself; it quietly lifts some people through life in a manner that makes living easier.